Google to stop giving answers to silly questions by updating its ‘’featured snippets’’. The company announced that it seeks to improve its search engine service. With this update, users will see fewer answers to the questions. These answers will be the most relevant to the question. Previously, there have been silly and comic answers to different questions.
Pandu Nayak, the Company‘s head of search announced the changes in a blog post. He said, ‘’ this clearly isn’t the most helpful way to display this result. “We’ve trained our systems to get better at detecting these sorts of false premises, which are not very common, but there are cases where it’s not helpful to show a featured snippet. We’ve reduced the triggering of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update.”
Snippets: Google’s AI cornerstone strategy
Google’s AI strategy is to use Snippet to respond to direct questions and satisfy search queries. Snippets can also be automatically generated from the content of the website.
In 2017, Google was accused of spreading “fake news” after a featured snippet for the question “Is Obama planning a coup?”, resulted in its voice assistant merrily telling users: “Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d’état at the end of his term in 2016,” after it found the information on a conspiracy website.
Comical answers are another error that occurs when queries are put in the search. In an effort to address the root cause of such mistakes, Google is also rolling out new warnings for times when a search term has hit a “data void” – a question where a good answer might simply not exist.
“It looks like there aren’t many great results for this search,” the site now warns users who hit such a query.
Nayak says.“This doesn’t mean that no helpful information is available. That a particular result is low-quality.’’ he further added, “These notices provide context about the whole set of results on the page, and you can always see the results for your query, even when the advisory is present.”
